A timely click propelled WordReference.com into Mark Abadi's top five all-time most visited web sites early Tuesday morning.
The upstart online English-Spanish dictionary whizzed past The New York Times en route to top five status when Abadi, struggling to describe in Spanish the shrill, musical sound he was producing with his lips, flocked to the site to translate "whistle" at 12:23 a.m.
The achievement marks the culmination of WordReference's meteoric rise through Abadi's Internet browser's main page. In late July, it hadn't even cracked the top eight displayed on the Google Chrome "new tab" screen.
However, Abadi's desire to learn Spanish slang, American football terminology and curse words pushed the site into Chrome superstardom.
The road to the top five wasn't easy. The task required overtaking established Abadi Internet staples such as nytimes.com, philliesnation.com and the700level.com, not to mention late-season threats by Stumble Upon and MLB.
Abadi's general ineptitude in the subjunctive tense helped the site gain a steady amount of daily visits to its conjugator feature. However, it wasn't until two weeks ago — when he forayed to the rarely used French-English translator in his efforts to impress French chicks — that the site began making a serious run.
"That was huge," WordReference founder Michael Kellogg said. "French chicks."
A spot in the top eight opened up in July, when, a day into his five-month stay in Argentina, Abadi realized the online TV show streaming site Hulu was unavailable outside the United States. Hulu's subsequent fall from grace is widely considered the most notable collapse since Abadi began using the Chrome browser half a year ago.
It is unlikely WordReference will challenge the "Big Four" — Deadspin, Facebook, Sporcle and YouTube — any time soon. But at the rate Abadi visits the site — he checked and rechecked the translations of "blind" and "deaf" 11 times yesterday alone — a place in the pantheon is well within reason.
At press time, Abadi was howling wildly in his apartment, wearing nothing but protective goggles, spraying his laptop with champagne.
Looking forward to the playoffs...with or without the protective goggles.
ReplyDeleteI realized the true miracle WordReference is the other day when forced to use an actual dictionary, surprisingly lacking in sweet, sweet vocabs. What a backwards age we lived in.
ReplyDelete